A pre-experiment on effects of horizontal and vertical touch displays on group work in card classification tasks

In order to verify the strengths and weaknesses of horizontal and vertical interactive displays, we designed a card classification task in which the directional properties of information are considered. We especially focused on investigating the impact of the directional properties of information on user performance and exploring the optimum group size for horizontal and vertical touch displays of the same size. We developed and evaluated some objective and simple methods to measure and analyze user performance including eye contact, time of utterance, and user arrangement. A pre-experiment was conducted in which groups ranging from two to six people performed the task on both a horizontal and a vertical display. Results show that, during the card classification task, more eye contact around the horizontal display but no difference in verbal participation between the two environments. Some evidence indicates the user performance was affected by the directional properties of information. We found the difference in user arrangement of different group size between the two environments in our tasks. We expect to conduct a large-scale experiment to collect more evidence to test our hypotheses.